Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
While researching 'Horse Soldiers,' I conducted over 100 interviews in the U.S. and in Afghanistan, and in Afghanistan, I walked and studied key sites that appear in the book. I was able to capture not only the Americans' point of view but the Afghans' as well.
Each summer, as Lake Michigan finally begins to warm, I think of the men of the World War II cruiser Indianapolis and the worst disaster at sea in United States naval history. I go down to the lake, and I wonder: How would I have survived what they experienced?
I started on computers with 'Billy Bathgate,' a little orange screen with black letters. I thought it was really cool, but it actually slowed me up for a while because it's so easy to revise, I tended to stay on the same page. I've learned to discipline myself.
Transformational entertainment is a story that both entertains and uplifts you, not simply because you are inspired, but because it reveals the mechanics that allow people to have more effective, loving lives, lives of more connection, community, and communion.
What is commonly called 'falling in love' is in most cases an intensification of egoic wanting and needing. You become addicted to another person, or rather to your image of that person. It has nothing to do with true love, which contains no wanting whatsoever.
Some people when I speak of awareness of the "inner body" call it a technique. I would not call it a technique because it is too simple for that. When the oak tree feels its roots in the earth, its connectedness with the earth, it is not practicing a technique.
The world is in such a mess because of the continuous conflict that arises between human beings - not only between individuals but between tribes and nations and this group and that group and so on. But change can come in only when people start with themselves.
I am delighted, one more time, by the daring of my species and the audacity of our flying machines. There is poetry and music in our technology, a beauty as touching as that of eagle, moss campion, raven or yonder limestone boulder shining under the Arctic sun.
History buffs expect historical background in historical fiction. Mystery readers expect forensics and police procedure in crime fiction. Westerns - gasp - describe the West. Techno-thriller readers expect to learn something about technology from their fiction.
Prayer must be broad in its scope - it must plead for others. Intercession for others is the hallmark of all true prayer. When prayer is confined to self and to the sphere of one's personal needs, it dies by reason of its littleness, narrowness and selfishness.
I see the author as the person who has written; the writer, the one involved in the process of writing. And they're not necessarily friends. The writer is the one I want to reinforce; the author would just feed on the reviews - so I'm in favour of starving him.
Spiritual strongholds begin with a thought. One thought becomes a consideration. A consideration develops into an attitude, which leads then to action. Action repeated becomes a habit, and a habit establishes a "power base for the enemy," that is, a stronghold.
A man must at times be hard as nails: willing to face up to the truth about himself, and about the woman he loves, refusing compromise when compromise is wrong. But he must also be tender. No weapon will breach the armor of a woman's resentment like tenderness.
When I look at my life and the lives of my female friends these days - with our dizzying number of opportunities and talents - I sometimes feel as though we are all mice in a giant experimental maze, scurrying around frantically, trying to find our way through.
I think that focusing all experiences through the lens of the Internet is an example of not being able to see history through the eyes of others, to be so enamored of one's present time that one cannot see that the world was once elsewise and was not about you.
The chief characteristic of 'The Tribune' under Greeley was an aggressive and even ostentatious purity. 'Immoral and degrading police reports,' and any notices of the existence of the theater, whether in news or advertising, were at first scrupulously excluded.
I often meet frustrated young writers who say they've only got so far and just can't finish a book. Even if you don't happen to use what you've worked on that day, it has taught you something and you'll be amazed when you might come back to it and use it again.
I became a conservative because I believe that caring for people means more than just spending taxpayer money; it means delivering results. It means respecting and challenging our citizens, telling them what they need to hear, not simply what they want to hear.
Whosoever believeth in His blood shall not perish. Those who believed Jesus came down from heaven got results when He was here because they knew He had divine blood, believed He was born of a virgin. He had the flesh of a human being, but the blood of divinity.
The reality is that every human being is placed on this planet, and one of the things that drives humans is their need for meaning, and if you can make every job meaningful, then you will guarantee that every job will be done to its highest level of excellence.
All is well. You did not come here to fix a broken world. The world is not broken. You came here to live a wonderful life. And if you can learn to relax a little and let it all in, you will begin to see the universe present you with all that you have asked for.
Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good novel of any year can initiate us into our own new experience.
The true leader serves. Serves people. Serves their best interests, and in doing so will not always be popular, may not always impress. But because true leaders are motivated by loving concern than a desire for personal glory, they are willing to pay the price.
Often we hate in others the thing which we fear in ourselves; or we hate because the other person raises to our consciousness some fault or inadequacy which we would prefer to have remain unconscious, and therefore without power to disturb our self-complacency.
My path has not been smooth. But the great thing about getting to be an elder is that you can look back and see the intense times of confusion and challenge, and see that if you keep walking through them, they can lead to times of great satisfaction and reward.
The passions do very often give birth to others of a nature most contrary to their own. Thus avarice sometimes brings forth prodigality, and prodigality avarice; a man's resolution is very often the effect of levity, and his boldness that of cowardice and fear.
We are cognizant of time, the sense that there is mutability. Time is change. It's the separation of eternity from itself. When eternity is separated from itself, we see it appear in different forms. Time is not a movement in space. Space is a movement in time.
We live in a world of wars and wars alarms, of famines, of oppression. While there are many wonderful people in this world, you'll notice one curious fact about them, they all suffer, they all die, and sometimes those who are the nicest seem to suffer the most.
Now, stopping thought is only the beginning. As Brahmananda, who was a disciple of Sri Ramakrishna, once remarked: The inner life begins with samadhi. This is an awesome thought, I realize, for the average person who meditates, that it could begin with samadhi.
The Buddhist mind is more complicated than the Christian mind. It comes up with endless heavens, endless hells, endless earths, and then we have something lower than hell. We have endless sub-realms that make hell look like Club Med and we have endless nirvana.
As an enlightened teacher of Buddhism, I'd like to welcome you to the pathway to enlightenment. I'd like to encourage you to be more positive, to engage in the practice meditation, to learn how to do this wonderful thing - make your mind still in a crazy world.
The loving parts of your personality are content, grateful, patient, appreciative, caring, and more. They are interested in others. They do not judge others or themselves. They are not confined by fear. The more you experience them, the more you experience joy.
Every action, thought, and feeling is motivated by an intention, and that intention is a cause that exists as one with an effect In this most profound way, we are held responsible for every action, thought, and feeling, which is to say, for our every intention.
The next day she’d examined her red satin sandals and with a frown said, “I’m thinking about buying two snakes.” His are you kidding me “Why?” had caused her to shrug. “I’d name them Leftie and Rightie and when they were big enough, they’d become Mamma’s boots.
Faith is that which, knowing the Lord's will, goes and does it; or, not knowing it, stands and waits, content in ignorance as in knowledge, because God wills - neither pressing into the hidden future, nor careless of the knowledge which opens the path of action
It was foolish indeed - thus to run farther and farther from all who could help her, as if she had been seeking a fit spot for the goblin creature to eat her in at his leisure; but that is the way fear serves us: it always sides with the thing we are afraid of.
The more I work with the body, keeping my assumptions in a temporary state of reservation, the more I appreciate and sympathize with a given disease. The body no longer appears as a sick or irrational demon, but as a process with its own inner logic and wisdom.
The boy should enclose and keep, as his life, the old child at the heart of him, and never let it go. He must still, to be a right man, be his mother's darling, and more, his father's pride, and more. The child is not meant to die, but to be forever fresh born.
In the field of snobbery, Australia is an underdeveloped country; even a few British ex-colonies, regarded as under developed in all other respects, could export a great deal of snobbery to Australia and still have enough to spare for their own, internal needs.
My uncomfortable duty as a Christian is to confess the truth, so lethal to our self-centered human nature: 'Jesus, who suffered your sin unto his own death, calls you likewise to forgive, so that God's purposes may be accomplished in both you and your offender.
The birds are already evolving, changing the way that they sing as a result of noise pollution. And we have yet to do that. We're still not communicating. We're not changing our words. We are not testing, not providing this new lexicon for noise-polluted areas.
Of all the planets apart from Earth in our solar system, Mars is the most hospitable. Yeah. Right. Better keep my visit short. And yet, despite the discomfort, the danger, I love it here. I love coming back for these imaginary vacations. The sights are amazing.
Kennedy was president for only 1,037 days, but during his short tenure, he achieved much. At the Cold War's most dangerous hour, he preserved the peace. He improved relations with the Soviet Union and replaced tension over Berlin with a limited test ban treaty.
Listen to it, and you are hearing the mighty currents of the air rushing down the latitudes of the earth, currents from the Mackenzie and the Athabasca and the Saskatchewan, and from the prairies and the white Tundra. It is a homeless wind, forever on the move.
A dancer on break approached him. She smiled. Each tooth was angled in a different direction, as if her mouth were the masterwork of a mad orthodontist. "Hi," she said. "Hi." "You're really cute." "I don't have any money." She spun and walked away. Ah, romance.
What I wanted to do and what I needed to do was something entirely different, and through reading Roussel I learned that I could do what I wanted all on my own and that I didn't have to rely on what had actually happened in my somewhat limited life and reading.
President Bush has asserted the right to wiretap and eavesdrop on any American without a warrant in the name of fighting terrorism. He has asserted presidential power beyond stated constitutional rights, and there is no Republican gutsy enough to call his hand.
The enemy of human happiness as well as the cause of poverty and starvation is not the birth of children. It is the failure of people to do with the earth what God could teach them to do if only they would ask and then obey, for they are agents unto themselves.
A mortal parent may appreciate, in some small way, the feelings of a loving Heavenly Father. When our children come to the age when they must leave our direct care, we feel anxiety for their safety and concern that those who are to help them will not fail them.
As for the tenets of the Brahmans, we are not so much concerned to know what doctrines they held, as that they were held by any. We can tolerate all philosophies.... It is the attitude of these men, more than any communication which they make, that attracts us.